When the gods are shaken from the sky,
there's a scientific reason why.
There's no wish to replace them
and no-one's rushing in to win
the race to fill the empty space
— All About Eve, "Outshine The Sun"

Thursday, 13 October 2016

For those people who have somehow managed to avoid it despite the fact that it's been linked all around the Internet for the past 10 years, this is a reminder that Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians is available free in PDF form at the link.

If you want to take the RWA-scale questionnaire from the book, I have put up a convenient online version; this is completely private, all scoring is client-side and no results are stored or sent anywhere (not even to me).

Sunday, 9 October 2016

Wright's conversion story (warning, have barf bag ready before reading, it's pretty bad even by SN standards) went up on SN in the relatively early days. One of Wright's claims in it is that as an atheist he had argued himself, by means of nothing but ‘pure’ ‘rational’ philosophy into positions otherwise held by Christians; his conversion story doesn't go into details about what those were, but from his other writings it seems clear that sexual matters were at least a significant part of this.

So I was interested (and amused) to see that Ozy Frantz has done a long takedown:

John C Wright is an absolutely delightful person whose blog posts have given me endless hours of enjoyment and who has recommended many excellent short stories (admittedly, by talking about how they are the Morlockian death of science fiction, but a good recommender is a good recommender, even if it’s wired backwards). I have recently discovered an old blog post of his which purported to lay out natural and worldly reasons why a rational atheist should follow Christian sexual morality. As an atheist libertine, I find this a tremendously interesting proposal and wish to argue with it.

Estranged Notions

In Jan 2014 the Catholic blog/debate site "Strange Notions", which had expressly invited debate from atheists, banned many of its most prominent atheist commenters (including Andrew G., the owner of this blog) and deleted over a thousand of their comments. They also deleted all discussion of the incident.

For now, the posts labelled "Estranged Notions" are being offered as an alternative venue for discussion.

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